Indiana won the second of its five national championship banners in 1953, when men's basketball coach Branch McCracken guided a team headed by Don Schlundt to a one-point victory over Kansas in the title game. By the time Bob Knight won a fifth banner for the Hoosiers in 1987, the days of McCracken and Schlundt, 34 years earlier, seemed part of a distant past.
It has now been 34 years since that last national title for IU, 19 since the program's last Final Four and five since the team's last appearance in the NCAA tournament. The first number represents Indiana's longest dry spell in the NCAA tournament era, while the other two figures signify the longest droughts in their respective categories for the Hoosiers since the bracket expanded to 64 teams in 1985.